Paul Mills - A Multi-Award-Winning Composer

Paul Mills is a multi-award-winning composer who has scored music for 15 feature films including the critically acclaimed Woodlawn and the #1-rated inspirational film, War Room, for which he won an ASCAP Screen Music Award.

We recently had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his career, his approach to his craft and his current projects.

How did you get into composing?

I have always been fascinated with music for film. Even as a kid at the lone theater in my small hometown I had an innate sense that the music behind the action on screen was having a great power in how I perceived the film. I started collecting some of the score albums I could find by composers like Henry Mancini, Earnest Gold, and Ennio Morricone.

Later, I studied composition at the University of Houston School of Music, and while there I worked part-time at a new local recording studio as the resident arranger/keyboard player/extra engineer. I met a filmmaker from San Antonio who was doing short films and documentaries and started doing all of his music scores. Years later, he moved to Los Angeles and while working on a film project, introduced me to the other filmmakers who gave me a shot at the score. It was an amazing experience, and many of those people are like family to me now. We recorded the score at Paramount M Studio, where many of my film heroes like Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry and Bernard Herrman recorded. That film was “Still Breathing” starring Brendan Fraser, the late Celeste Holm, Lou Rawls and Joanna Going. A childhood dream was realized and I was hooked.

Where do you find your inspiration when composing?